1. Field
The apparatuses and methods described herein relate to using diffuse light to facilitate detecting conformance of a surface to a requirement, such as a flatness of a surface.
2. Description of the Related Art
Equipment and techniques for determining flatness of a surface vary, but manual methods typically include using a trubar, a precision made cylindrical steel bar. However, a trubar is cumbersome to use in most applications. The trubar is simply a very accurate flat reference that can be placed against another surface when checking the other surface for flatness. To use a trubar, such as to check flatness of a snow ski, a user must position the surface of the ski to be checked substantially in a plane of the user's line of sight while placing the trubar on the surface and then moving the ski around to look for small amounts of ambient light passing through any gaps between the trubar and the surface. Detecting more than a small amount of the surface requires repositioning the ski in the line of sight before repeating the above procedure.
One exemplary drawback of this process is that without good lighting, it is difficult to detect critical variations in the surface being checked. Given the need to often reposition the object in the user's line of sight and reposition the trubar on the surface being checked, gaining good lighting becomes an additional step after each adjustment.